


lily and the graveyard

by Elsin



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Book 4: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Gen, Implied/Referenced Canonical Character Death, Oaths & Vows, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-25
Updated: 2020-11-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:40:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27668351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elsin/pseuds/Elsin
Summary: Lily Potter makes an oath.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 63
Collections: Time Oops Exchange 2020





	lily and the graveyard

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Hadrian_Pendragons](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hadrian_Pendragons/gifts).



Lily makes an oath, the day she learns she’s pregnant. It isn’t the kind of vow one learns about in modern magical texts, between two participants in some sort of agreement; it isn’t tied to her life or her magic either.

She’s nineteen years old and fighting a guerilla civil war against a megalomaniacal Dark Lord, one who’d see her killed even if she didn’t stand against him, and she’s going to bring a child into this world. Into this _war._ Maybe it’s not very responsible of her, but she can’t quite bring herself to regret it.

Even so, she’s not going to take this lightly. She _can’t_ take this lightly, if she wants to give her child every possible protection from harm.

And that’s why she goes out to the woods, that cold November night at the dark of the moon. There are a few elements of this oath that would never come up at Hogwarts; they don’t teach old hedgewitch practices anymore. It’s a good thing, then, that she grew up with Severus, who knew just as much about hedge-magic as he did about curses by the time they started school and taught her nearly all of it.

A spell-site at a river bend. A willow tree more than a hundred years old. A clear, moonless sky, covered in glittering stars. Lily casts a spell on herself to let her see in the low light; she can’t have artificial lights here. It would interfere with the oath.

There’s a soft breeze whispering through the woods, lifting her hair from her shoulders before letting it settle again. She’s always had something of an affinity for the winds; that they should come to her here feels like a good omen.

This is an old ritual, an old oath; of course it involves blood. Lily cuts both her palms, holds them out away from her to let her blood fall onto the ground and into the river’s waters.

“My name is Lily Evans Potter,” she says. “I swear myself tonight to my child. I swear myself to this land. As long as I am able, as long as I am allowed, I shall protect them both with everything I have to give.

“Even if I must become as Arthur under the mountain, I will keep this oath; I will not rest until it is fulfilled.” The wind has picked up, and Lily’s hands are tingling. She swallows and places them on the trunk of the tree before going on.

“May Albion accept me, in all that I am,” she says softly. “May Albion accept me as a champion, for my child and for her.”

Fire surges through her veins, and for a single awful moment, Lily _is_ Britain. She feels the land and the sea, and the people—there are _so many people—_ and then it’s gone, and she’s back in her own skin again. The wind caresses her briefly, then dies down.

When she looks down at her hands, she sees that her shallow wounds have become faint white scars.

There is nothing more to be done here. Lily turns on the spot, and Apparates herself home.

* * *

Almost two years later, she stands between her son and Lord Voldemort in the house in Godric’s Hollow. She’s done everything she can; almost all the wards are broken now. The protection of the Fidelius is gone. There’s only her left to defend her son, her in comfortable Muggle clothes and stocking feet against the greatest Dark Lord of their age.

Voldemort tells her to stand aside; of course she does no such thing. And she does not dodge his spell either, not with Harry behind her. Maybe this will only prolong his life a little bit. Maybe it will do something more. She cannot say.

_Let him be safe,_ she thinks. _Let me protect him. Let him live._ The scars on her hands burn sharply.

The last thing she sees is a blinding flash of green, right before her world ends.

* * *

She wakes up. That’s the first surprising thing. The next surprising thing is this: she’s not in some sort of afterlife, as far as she can tell. She’s lying on cool damp grass, in the dark. When she opens her eyes she sees that she’s in a graveyard, next to a glittering crystal cup. Her scars have stopped burning.

And not too far away, she sees a group of people in all-too-familiar hoods and masks hurrying towards a pair of wizards in the midst of a duel, a thin golden thread connecting their wands, a golden dome separating them from the world outside.

Lily cannot do anything to change the circumstances of the duelists, but she can certainly make the Death Eaters’ lives more difficult. She whispers an incantation, twirls her wand lightly in a deceptively simple gesture, and calls up the wind. This spell is especially nice for attacking from an ambush; when the wind comes to harry the Death Eaters, twisting their robes around their legs and blowing them into each other, it comes from all directions. A skilled enough wizard _could_ tell where she was, but, well. She doesn’t have to look too hard to realize there’s not much skill to be had here.

The duel is blocked off, and she wouldn’t know what was going on between the combatants even if it wasn’t. She doesn’t try to interfere there; instead she keeps twirling her wand, shaping the wind to cause the maximum amount of chaos among the Death Eaters. Five of them go down in a heap, and a sixth has just tripped over those ones, when the connection breaks and Lily sees the dome begin to fade.

Someone comes racing towards her in the dark, one of the duelists, and the Death Eaters all immediately try to attack the fleeing figure; Lily doesn’t hesitate before shaping the wind to help them even as she continues to hinder the Death Eaters and the other duelist. As far as she’s concerned, any enemy of theirs is a friend to her in a situation like this.

As the figure approaches—a teenage boy, dark-haired—his eyes go wide. He’s probably seen her, then.

“How are we getting away?” Lily asks as soon as he’s in earshot, not giving him time to overthink things. Behind him, the Death Eaters are starting to figure out how to work with her winds; she doesn’t fancy staying here on her own, and if he doesn’t have an exit strategy she can Apparate them both away. 

“The cup,” he says raggedly. “The cup—it’s a Portkey—but we can’t leave without Cedric—”

“Where’s Cedric?”

“Just over there—”

“Then let’s go to him,” she says, and gets up, internally cursing her unshod feet as they run across the dark grass.

Cedric, it turns out, is a handsome teenage boy. Cedric, as it turns out, is also _dead,_ wide-eyed, his face frozen in surprise.

“Be ready to grab a handle,” the boy says, even as Lily reinforces her spell—it slipped a little as they ran. _“Accio Cup!”_

The glittering crystal cup soars through the air to them—Lily drops her spell—the boy opens his hand, and so does she—their hands close on the cup’s handles—

Lily feels the familiar tug in her abdomen, and then they’re away, spinning through the ether.

* * *

They land on grass, still cool, not nearly as damp or dark. In fact, they seem to be under lights. Her companion is kneeling there, clutching Cedric’s wrist tightly, trying to keep his breathing steady; when she looks up she sees a whole crowd of people, all of them staring silently down.

The silence doesn’t last long, of course. Soon, whispers are sweeping through the crowd, growing louder with every passing moment, and it’s not long after that that people begin to pour down to the field to approach them.

Before anyone actually reaches them, though, the boy slowly raises his head and turns to look at her. 

Lily’s world turns upside down.

She thought—well. She didn’t _have_ much time to think, in the graveyard. Maybe she assumed that the Killing Curse had somehow combined with her oath, teleported her away, but she would never have guessed—

The dark-haired boy is the spitting image of James, but his features are a little softer and rounder; his eyes are striking bright green.

Lily hasn’t only traveled through space. Somehow, she’s also traveled through _time_.

Well, then. She can’t say she saw _that_ coming, when she made her oath, but… she’s here now.

The war never ended, it seems. Or maybe it began again; either way, she knows what she must do.

She swore herself a protector. It’s about time she started living up to that oath.


End file.
